Technology

Jurchen Technology and Blue Circle Energy have decided to develop a 60 MW portfolio of community solar gardens, distributed across 50 sites.

The threat of catastrophic climate change, as well as increasingly obvious economic benefits, make it advisable, indeed essential, to convert our entire energy system to a sustainable system, based on renewable energy (RE) as soon as possible. The two main pillars of our future RE-based energy system will be power generation from PV and wind. In Germany alone, according to detailed studies by Fraunhofer-Institut für Solare Energiesysteme ISE, we will need at least about 300 GW of PV and an equally large amount of wind power.

An international research team has investigated how air conditioning may be used to reduce the operating temperature of PV panels. The researchers not only found that the proposed approach is technically viable, but they also tested the use of excess heat from the panels for drying dishes.

Fenice Energy, formerly SunEdison, has developed single-phase and three-phase microinverters for residential and commercial solar installations. The microinverters support up to 670 Wp+ PV modules, with a maximum input current of 20 A.

First Solar and its cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology dominate thin-film solar in the mainstream market. Valerie Thompson looks at the US-based business and the future of thin-film PV technology.

In its first commercial project, Terabase Energy successfully installed 17 MW of a 225 MW solar facility with its automated Terafab platform.

A Spanish-Algerian reserch group has tested how “cool roofs” could help increase power yield in rootop bifacial PV systems. Cool roofs are based on coating materials with high reflectance properties.

Epishine, an organic PV module manufacturer, has completed a new factory in Linköping, Sweden. The facility uses roll-to-roll equipment to produce new products for low-power battery replacement and the self-powered electronics market.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has used a new selenization approach to build a kesterite solar cell with better charge transport and power conversion efficiency. China’s National PV Industry Metrology and Testing Center (NPVM) has certified the results.

The University of French Polynesia has built a PV-driven hydrogen generation unit that combines a hydrogen chain with a thermochemical unit. The latter is used to recover waste heat from the electrolyzer and fuel cell to enable deferred cooling production for air conditioning.